• MFA in Fine Art

Waiting for the Water to Drizzle on my Chest

Eve Parnell

Joy, suppression, suspicion and enforced conformity. Eve Parnell studies everyday gestures and scenes, drawing with cheap black biro on artist-quality canvas textured paper. Working with biro brings its own constraints and rules, it is unyielding and once a line is drawn, it cannot be erased.

The biro is inky and lovely and nasty! The extensive areas of blackness, where the pen has expended itself onto the page, shift and fall like a velvet curtain. The paper is not fully saturated; tiny white points like dust mites float as if in an atmosphere charged room.

In these apparently banal images, there are parallels with the acceptance of the mania for killing during World War II, and the mania for slaughter to satisfy consumerism today. The drawings contain a mixture of languorous apathy and implied violence. It’s about value. The valueless and the valuable. The artist asks, which one are you?